What do you think of these ten tips? They are entitled ‘How to work better’, but I think they make a great set of rules for life. If I could follow just one or two of them for just a few minutes each day, I would be a lot further down the road to self-enlightenment and general well-being.
It’s interesting where I found them. I went to Tate Modern this week to see the Gauguin exhibition, and I entered by the staff entrance round the back, because I was visiting with someone who uses a wheelchair, and this is the temporary entrance for disabled visitors. And these ten rules were displayed for the staff as they went to work each day, not on a scruffy sheet of A4 pinned to the door, but on a huge 5 foot poster stuck on the wall next to the lift. Impressive! And the staff were unfailingly courteous.
In case you can’t read the image, or want to paste them elsewhere, here they are in plain text:
HOW TO WORK BETTER
- Do one thing at a time
- Know the problem
- Learn to listen
- Learn to ask questions
- Distinguish sense from nonsense
- Accept change as inevitable
- Admit mistakes
- Say it simple
- Be calm
- Smile
Bridges and Tangents 
Great. I Love asking questions but in blog land it seems fashionable not to have them answered, This makes one search harder for the answers themselves. The answers can then be quite interesting and unexpected. I am desperate to get to the Gauguin and ‘experience’ his controversial paintings before it closes but I have lost days lately and the time keeps slipping by, what was it like?
I used to have this brilliant training video called FISH. I don’t know if you know about FISH but the video used to cost hundreds of pounds and was about a wet FISH stall in Seattle. This stall was a totally successful, vibrant, engaging place to just go hang out and watch in your lunch hour and the business was totally successful. It is now world famous. It had a simple few rules which the people working there used to live by to make their working environment amazing for themselves and for the customer. It was so successful it became a world training video which many companies used to train their staff with.
I used to live my life by it. Ironic that it’s called FISH and now I am FISH myself!
I think these rules are fantastic!
I have to say, very much tongue in cheek, that my Wife and all my female friends would say that the first rule was written by a man as we are no good at multi-tasking! Nonetheless, they all make perfect common sense when read together (or is that the man in me speaking?).
Hello Father Stephen,
Such present I have recived for my birthday this year,I have seen the queen of art.
There are jobs where ones have to smile for obligation,in costumers service,
fine,I love to recive a smile for them when I am a costumer but I hate to smile for obligation.
I think have to be a peace of art,they try to sell something.
Really is not something others have to reminder me to do it.
Smile is not a rule of life ,so far, is the most expontaneus sign of happinnes.
Dear Stephen Wang,
Ryan Gander will be glad to hear that you took his art project so seriously and actually think they were for the staff working there.